El Niño ends with uncertainty over cooler future, says BBC

The BBC likes to lace articles like this with ‘climate change’ as though it’s a brand, without ever defining it. As usual an obvious case of a natural cycle is infected by some preconceived ideas and assertions of alarmists. But their high hopes and predictions of a lengthy El Niño have faded on this occasion, as potential La Niña conditions start to appear. There’s talk of uncharted territory ahead due to last year’s unexpected ‘heat spike’.
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The powerful El Niño weather event which along with climate change has helped push global temperatures to new highs, has ended, say scientists.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology says the Pacific Ocean has “cooled substantially” in the past week.

This naturally occurring episode that began last June brought warmer waters to the surface of the Pacific, adding extra heat to the atmosphere, says BBC News.

But what happens next is uncertain, say researchers.

When the global climate has the hiccups – ‘repeated rapid increases in temperature’

Promoters of a current ‘climate crisis’ often call modern warming and/or events within it, ‘unprecedented’. However, compared to events like this: “A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life” [explains Prof.], not much is presently going on. Climate variability can happen in different ways, and repeat over long timescales.
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In recent geological history, the so-called Quaternary period, there have been repeated ice ages and warm periods, says Science Daily.

Researchers are able to determine past climate variability from the composition of climate records. In the case of the last glacial period 100,000 years ago, ice cores from Greenland in particular provide researchers with detailed data.

For example, Greenland ice cores show that there were repeated rapid increases in temperature.

“We are talking about increases of 5 to 10 degrees within 30 to 40 years on average in the case of Europe. A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life,” explains Prof. Dominik Fleitmann, Professor of Quaternary Geology at the University of Basel.

He calls the phenomena “climate hiccups.”

These Dansgaard-Oeschger events are well documented for the last glacial period, but the climate records from Greenland only cover the last 120,000 years.

It was therefore previously unknown whether these Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period 135,000 to 190,000 years ago.

Frederick Held, a PhD candidate in Fleitmann’s research group, was able to show that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period using isotopic measurements on stalagmites.

He is the lead author of the study which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The North Atlantic as the source of change

The stalagmites examined originate from the Sofular Cave in Turkey, which is located in a region that is very sensitive to climate change.

The researchers therefore refer to it as a key region, as it is influenced by the winds of the North Atlantic and the Black Sea is just a few kilometers away.

“We used the isotopic composition in the stalagmites to determine the moisture sources from which they are formed — the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic,” explains Frederick Held.

For the first time, the evaluations carried out on the stalagmites from the Sofular Cave have proven that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period.

“It was previously unknown whether these relatively brief temperature events actually happened in earlier glacial periods,” states Held.

However, they occurred less frequently in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one: “The temperature peaks are twice as far apart from one another, meaning there were longer cold phases between them.”

These temperature fluctuations originate in the North Atlantic, as the circulation of the ocean is a global conveyor belt for heat and can sometimes be stronger and sometimes weaker.

“For example, the circulation affects the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean, which, in turn, impacts the balance of heat in the Northern Hemisphere and air flows and rainfall,” explains Held.

He states that weakened circulation also reduces the quantity of CO2 which the ocean absorbs from the atmosphere.

These ocean currents were different in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one, which explains the different intervals between the Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

This shows that not all glacial periods are the same and not all warm periods are the same.
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The geologist also hopes to clarify any outstanding questions by means of additional analyses. “For example, we do not yet know whether the increases in temperature were periodic or stochastic, in other words random.”

Full article here.

Image: Greenland ice core [credit: K. Makinson @ Wikipedia]

Is Iceland entering a new volcanic era?

Scientists think there’s some evidence of a centuries-long periodic pattern or cycle, but aren’t sure what it is or what determines the length of it. The graphic shows the most recent two of the five marked phases are west of the earlier ones, plus some apparent north-east to south-west alignments, but otherwise it’s open to intepretation.
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This week, Iceland woke up to yet another day of fire, as towering fountains of lava lit up the dark morning sky, says BBC News.

This time the evacuated town of Grindavik was spared, but the molten rock still wrought havoc – engulfing a pipe that provides heat and hot water to thousands living in the area and cutting off a road to the Blue Lagoon tourist attraction.

It is the third short-lived eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula since December 2023 and the sixth since 2021. But scientists think this is just the start of a period of volcanic activity that could last for decades or even centuries.

So what is going on?

The Sahara Desert used to be a green savannah : Research explains why – it’s a climate cycle

Sahara desert from space [image credit: NASA]

We’re informed that ‘scientists have identified more than 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years.’ (Ice ages may account for the numerical shortfall). Climate models aren't able to simulate these greenings, or at least not their magnitude. The period they identify is the combined precession cycle, i.e. the beat period of the tropical and anomalistic orbits (years) of the Earth (when the difference between the number of each reaches 1). Inevitably it’s about the energy received from the Sun.
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Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.

Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today.

The Sun’s Rampant Activity Is Likely to Peak Really, Really Soon: Study

Variation in solar activity during a recent sunspot cycle [credit: Wikipedia]

So soon there’s barely time to read the study, if the prediction is anywhere near correct. Solar cycle 25 has already defeated the majority of pundits anyway, by being considerably more active prior to its peak than the last one. However, at least one group of researchers has already forecast a peak around now (see this April 2023 Talkshop post). The latest (i.e. just revised) Hathaway/Upton forecast graphic is here. What the value is of SC predictions of such short duration, even if they turn out to be close to correct, is not entirely clear. It seems like placing a bet when the jockeys can already see the finish line.
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A new study has found that the impending peak in the Sun’s activity cycle will likely arrive significantly sooner than previously predicted, says Science Alert.

According to an analysis by astrophysicists Priyansh Jaswal, Chitradeep Saha, and Dibyendu Nandy at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India, solar maximum is likely to hit in January 2024.

This is much, much sooner than the initial official prediction, which found solar maximum would take place in July 2025.

‘Time’s finally up’: Impending Iceland eruption is part of centuries-long volcanic pulse

Lava fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula [image credit: Vincent van Zeijst @ Wikipedia]

The headline obviously raises the question of the origin of such a pulse and of its suggested frequency. On the other hand a damp squib (from a spectator point of view) can’t be ruled out entirely at this stage, although some of the cracks already appearing on the surface do look quite large and other signs are ominous.
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Iceland’s potentially imminent eruption in the Reykjanes Peninsula is part of a 1,000-year cycle of volcanic activity that will likely cause eruptions for centuries, scientists say.

“Time’s finally up,” Edward W. Marshall, a researcher at the University of Iceland’s Nordic Volcanological Center, told LiveScience in an email. “We can get ready for another few hundred years of eruptions on the Reykjanes.”

Seismic activity began increasing in the south of the peninsula in October, with hundreds of earthquakes recorded there each day. On Nov. 10, authorities evacuated the town of Grindavík, with experts warning a volcanic eruption could take place in just days.

Strange anomaly in sun’s solar cycle discovered in centuries-old texts from Korea

Perhaps we should be looking out for an anomalously short solar cycle to provide support for predictions of an approaching return to
cooler planetary conditions? The aurora-based result doesn’t appear in the 2021 tree ring study reported here, which goes back as far as AD 969.
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The sun’s solar cycles were once around three years shorter than they are today, a new analysis of centuries-old Korean chronicles reveals.

This previously unknown anomaly occurred during a mysterious solar epoch known as the “Maunder Minimum,” more than 300 years ago, says LiveScience.

The sun is constantly in a state of flux. Our home star cycles through periods of increased activity, known as solar maximum, when solar storms become more frequent and powerful, as well as spells of reduced activity, known as solar minimum, when solar storms almost completely disappear.

New research says orbital factors show why and when the Sahara Desert was green

Sahara desert from space [image credit: NASA]

No trace gases required to drive these climate processes. It was found that ‘the North African Humid Periods occurred every 21,000 years and were determined by changes in Earth’s orbital precession.’
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A pioneering study has shed new light on North African humid periods that have occurred over the past 800,000 years and explains why the Sahara Desert was periodically green, says Science Daily.

The research, published in Nature Communications, showed periodic wet phases in the Sahara were driven by changes in Earth’s orbit around the Sun and were suppressed during the ice ages.

For the first time, climate scientists simulated the historic intervals of ‘greening’ of the Sahara, offering evidence for how the timing and intensity of these humid events were also influenced remotely by the effects of large, distant, high-latitude ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere.

Yndestad: A Cold Climate Period is coming

Prof. Harald Yndestad explains the research and calculations behind his ideas, and how he not only came to question IPCC-type predictions of large temperature rises in the next decades, but arrived at his own.
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Climate data series reveals we are moving into a new serious cold climate period.

1. Solar irradiation from the sun has a computed maximum in 2017 and deep minimum in 2050.
2. Solar forced climate variation has a computed 500-year maximum in 2025, and a 1000-year deep minimum in 2070AD.

Read more here.

New research looks at ‘stalled trend in Arctic Ocean sea ice loss since 2007’

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

Not the often-quoted ‘rapid decline’ any more then. But what’s behind the stalled trend? The researchers point to a climate cycle known as the Arctic dipole, first proposed in 2006, which ‘reverses itself’, and should (they say) be about to do so again. Are declining solar cycles accompanied by greatly reduced geomagnetic activity (see here) in the same recent years another factor, or just coincidental?
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New research by an international team of scientists explains what’s behind a stalled trend in Arctic Ocean sea ice loss since 2007, says Phys.org.

The findings indicate that stronger declines in sea ice will occur when an atmospheric feature known as the Arctic dipole reverses itself in its recurring cycle.

The many environmental responses to the Arctic dipole are described in a paper published online today in the journal Science. This analysis helps explain how North Atlantic water influences Arctic Ocean climate.

Scientists call it Atlantification.

Study shows a decrease in Indian Ocean cyclones, due to natural climate cycle (PDO)

Indian ocean

Natural climate variation is there to be observed (see title of paper), if anyone wants to. No dependency on CO2 levels required, despite the vague assertions made here.
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While the threat of tropical cyclones increases around the world – [Talkshop comment – which study said that?], a new study published in Nature Communications shows one area experienced a significant decline in cyclone activity, says Phys.org.

The paper, “Pacific Decadal Oscillation Causes Fewer Near-Equatorial Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean,” is co-authored by Pallav Ray, associate professor in meteorology at Florida Tech, along with researchers from [various universities] and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (India).

But, with recent changes in climatic patterns in the Pacific, the number of cyclones is expected to increase in the coming decades.
. . .
The findings showed a 43% decline in the number of low latitude (originating between 5–11 degrees) cyclone formations from 1981–2010 in the north Indian Ocean compared to the number of formations between 1951–1980.

The decline is primarily due to the weakened low-level vorticity modulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the increased vertical wind shear. The PDO is a long-term fluctuation in sea surface temperature of the north Pacific Ocean.

The PDO waxes and wanes approximately every 20 to 30 years, going through “cool” and “warm” phases.

Tropical cyclones do not form easily near the equator but can intensify rapidly. The wind pattern in the Indian Ocean helps initiate the cyclone spin near the equator. Without the storm-weakening wind shear, storms can move and strengthen more easily.

This research can help communities in the path of these rapidly intensifying storms better understand how to be prepared for them.

“I hope that this paper will bring a lot more interest in these types of storms,” Ray said. “One of the reasons why these types of storms have not received much attention is because most cyclone researchers work on the Atlantic and such storms are very rare there.”
. . .
“There has been a decline close to the equator, but there has been an increase at the same time away from the equator, in the Indian Ocean,” Ray said. “Overall, there is a decline definitely, but the decline is not this high, because there was an increase away from the equator.”

Full article here.

The clouds on Neptune perform a surprise disappearing act, linked to the solar cycle

Neptune

As the senior author of the study noted: “These remarkable data give us the strongest evidence yet that Neptune’s cloud cover correlates with the sun’s cycle”. The planet receives only 1/900th of the sunlight we get on Earth.
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For the first time in nearly three decades of observations, clouds seen on Neptune have all but vanished, says Phys.org.

Images from 1994 to 2022 of the big blue planet captured from Maunakea on Hawaiʻi Island through the lens of W. M. Keck Observatory, along with views from space via NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show clouds are nearly gone with the exception of the south pole.

The observations, which are published in the journal Icarus, further reveal a connection between Neptune’s disappearing clouds and the solar cycle—a surprising find given that Neptune is the farthest major planet from the sun and receives only 1/900th of the sunlight we get on Earth.

What If Climate is Self-Regulating?

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‘Sadly, climate science has morphed into climate rhetoric.’ — That’s what happens when a one-variable theory is proposed for a multi-variable system.
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Science Matters

Andy Kessler writes at WSJ Can the Climate Heal Itself?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Dissenters from the catastrophe consensus on warming are worth listening to.

Stop with all the existential-crisis talk. President Biden said, “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also talks about the “existential threat” of climate change. National security adviser Jake Sullivan identifies an “accelerating climate crisis” as one reason for a “new consensus” for government picking winners and losers in the economy. Be wary of those touting consensus.

But what if the entire premise is wrong?What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years— living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in

View original post 782 more words

Rocks beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet reveal ‘surprising past’- i.e. natural variation

Thwaites Glacier [image credit: NASA]

Why the surprise? Natural climate cycles are well documented in Earth’s history. Their ‘many glaciers’ turn out to mostly mean the area around Thwaites Glacier (aka the Doomsday Glacier), known to be affected by subglacial volcanoes and other geothermal “hotspots”, which obviously have nothing to do with the current obsession over atmospheric trace gases.
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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is shrinking, with many glaciers across the region retreating and melting at an alarming rate, claims the British Antarctic Survey @ Phys.org.

However, this was not always the case according to new research published last month (April 28) in The Cryosphere. [Talkshop comment – self-evident].

A team of scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), including two researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), discovered that the ice sheet near Thwaites Glacier was thinner in the last few thousand years than it is today.

This unexpected find shows that glaciers in the region were able to regrow following earlier shrinkage.

Study: ‘Warm ice age’ changed climate cycles

Credit: Robert A. Rohde @ Wikipedia

Re. the well-known 100,000 year problem, the researchers propose new climate-related evidence for ‘the shift from the 40,000-year cycles to the 100,000-year cycles we experience today’.
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Approximately 700,000 years ago, a “warm ice age” permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth, says Phys.org.

Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded.

A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection.

Jupiter, Earth and Venus’ tropical alignments point to the mean solar cycle length

Precession of Earth’s axis [image credit: NASA, Mysid @ Wikipedia]

Introduction:
A number of researchers have hypothesised that the relative motions of Jupiter, Earth and Venus are connected to the length of solar cycles. In this post we will show that cyclic periods of 83 years (Gleissberg), 166 years (Landscheidt, Wilson), and 996 years (Eddy, Stefani et al) are found not just in the syzygies and synodic periods between these planets, but also in their heliocentric orientations with respect to a frame of reference rotating at the rate of Earth’s axial precession. This discovery has implications for our understanding of the forces driving that axial precession, and opens some new avenues for hypothesising about the links between planetary motion and solar activity variations.

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We propose that not only amplitude, but the mean period of the solar cycle itself derives from planetary influence in a specific manner.

Solar maximum may arrive later this year, say researchers

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

Nothing better than actual observations to make a forecast change. The sun may have put one over the pundits again.
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Solar Maximum is coming–maybe this year, says Spaceweather.com.

New research by a leading group of solar physicists predicts maximum sunspot activity in late 2023 or early 2024, a full year earlier than other forecasts.

“This is based on our work with the Termination Event,” explains Scott McIntosh, lead author of a paper describing the prediction, published in the January 2023 edition of Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

What caused the record-low Antarctic sea ice in austral summer 2022? Natural variation perhaps…

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

Sea ice levels are notorious for misuse by climate alarmists. Thankfully no mention of climate red herrings in this study.
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Antarctic sea ice is an important component of the climate system [snip – redundant climate waffle] — [and] significant changes in Antarctic sea ice have been observed, says Phys.org.

Specifically, it experienced a slow increase during 1979–2014, but a rapid decline thereafter.

Despite a modest recovery after the record minimum in 2017, the sea ice area during austral summer 2022 (December 2021 to February 2022) again hit a new record minimum, at 3.07 million km2, which is approximately a 25% reduction compared with its long-term mean during 1981–2010.

New Model Explains The Water Cycles of Mars’s Swiss Cheese-Looking South Pole

Mars [image credit: NASA]

It’s said to be related to the current obliquity cycle period of about 100,000 years. Mystery solved?
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Seen from space, regions of Mars around the south pole have a bizarre, pitted “Swiss cheese” appearance, says ScienceAlert.

These formations come from alternating massive deposits of CO2 ice and water ice, similar to different layers of a cake.

For decades, planetary scientists wondered how this formation was possible, as it was long believed that this layering would not be stable for long periods of time.

Solar cycle 25 ‘is exceeding expectations in terms of activity’

Variation in solar activity during a recent sunspot cycle [credit: Wikipedia]

The article says ‘The average sunspot numbers for January and February 2023 were some of the highest for around 10 years’. Rarely mentioned, but Jupiter’s perihelion, i.e. its closest orbital approach to the Sun, occurred in late January.
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With several solar flares and coronal mass ejections soaring out into space, the sun has had an active few months as the current solar cycle gathers momentum, says Newsweek.

This solar cycle, Solar Cycle 25, is exceeding expectations in terms of activity, as it was initially forecast in 2019 that it would have a similar activity level to that of the previous cycle.

However, Solar Cycle 25 has now outperformed the official forecast for over 24 consecutive months, with sunspot numbers already approaching those seen during the maximum of the previous cycle.

The average sunspot numbers for January and February 2023 were some of the highest for around 10 years, according to NOAA data, with January seeing 143 sunspots, while February had 110. The previous highest-scoring month was during the peak of the previous cycle, Solar Cycle 24, with 146 sunspots occurring in February 2014.

The solar cycle follows 11-year fluctuations of activity, increasing towards the solar maximum in the middle of each cycle. The last solar minimum was in 2019, with the next solar maximum forecast for 2025. Solar Cycle 25 is so-called because it is the 25th cycle since records began in 1755.

These increased sunspot levels have led to higher frequencies of solar activity, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which have lit up the night sky with spectacular aurora as far south as France, and caused several geomagnetic storm-triggered radio blackouts in the past week alone.

When the twisted magnetic fields of sunspots suddenly realign, this can cause the sun to release huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation in the form of solar flares, and also spew out vast clouds of solar plasma as CMEs.

These solar phenomena then react with the chemicals in our atmosphere, leading to a kaleidoscope of colors being seen in the night sky in the form of the Northern and Southern lights, as were seen across the world on Tuesday as a result of two massive CMEs released on February 24 and 25.

Full article here.
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NASA’s Solar Cycle 25 blog is here.